“My way of working is to take something already in place and twisting it, turning it, give it your own turn. They say about Bach, "He left no form as he found it,” and what I want to do with Jung or with Freud is to leave no form as I found it. Therefore, people say I’m twisting Jung – I think that the spirit in Jung’s work gets another shape each time you pick it up, and different people pick it up differently. I picked it up my way. Some have never put their own hands on it, really … they have played it back like a gramophone. Without Jung I would not have been able to think any of the things I thought. Pupils make a founder. Pupils take you literally and turn you into a founder. They take your thought and write theses about it, explanations, interpretations, and they want to practice it according to rules; they read what you said and they say, “That is what he said and I am going to do it that way”; and they stop twisting it!“(Hillman, J.H. (1983). Inter Views, Spring Publications (Woodstock): p. 27.

Comment,11/15/2012

On first reflection, by "twist” Hillman means to alter the psychological meanings in his own personal way. Yet his twists also seek to avoid becoming literal about Jungian psychology so as to pull something out of a concept or turn it by either isolating or fastening down some aspect, which adds to the original meaning a nuance or variation.

To attempt to “twist” a meaning gives it a non-linear or non-directional push, so that the process sets something in motion, but the caveat is to avoid the ego desire to get from point a to point b. Hillman-type twisted concepts attempt to spiralize the original idea, that is to hopefully enliven and expand them by giving it a more vegetal shape.

Twisting, as a psychological process, takes one on the snake-like saurian winding road of amplification and association where one can more easily give a concept a chance to re-shape and also it shifts the momentum away from linear interpretation. Twisting a concept becomes an internal “betracten” (Jung, 1997, p. 661) or brooding process that imaginally squirms and writhes, in the serpentine dance within the darkness. It becomes the devious rotating of an idea – the devolution of progressive thinking to enable something new to arise.

If one is not satisfied, desiring a further imaginal possibility, one may take on the move of process from twist to turn, which changes the motion from serpentine to rotary. Now we leave the reptilian analogy (domain?) and enter the imaginal world of warm-blooded mammalian function. This upsets the regular balance and order that we habitually use in everyday life process to move or even reverse the vantage point.

Amazon Reviews

This is the Baynes translation. In my opinion, Baynes, a medical doctor, analytical psychologist who trained under Jung, gives a translations that has quite a different feel from the Collected Works of Jung (translator most of the volumes is Hull). Hull wasn’t a medical doctor and so, though his knowledge of Jung was encyclopedic, lacked the clinical feel that is retained in the Baynes translation. So my suggestion, particularly for all who maintain a clinical practice and want to incorporate Jung’s ideas into their practice or for all Jungian analysts or trainees, is that this book is a must have for your library and education.

A Psychological Look at Spirit (Part 2)

“Ye know only the sparks of the spirit: but ye do not see the anvil which it is, and the cruelty of its hammer” (Lecture VI, 9 June 1937).

As mentioned in Part 1, Nietzsche’s intuitive genesis presents a new picture of geist (spirit): the “sparks" produced when a hammer strikes an anvil representing the new (spirit) of his age (the Zeitgeist).

Nietzsche’s image reflects upon his keen observation that by the end of the nineteenth century, the educated European possessed or was possessed (1) by the tremendous ideas that shook the foundations of society. What appeared on the outside was that the leaders in scientific and philosophical research had adopted a "mechanistic” (e.g. scientific / materialistic) approach and conception to life. Though the philosophical approach of the previous Protestant religious tradition still predominated among the masses and in the more conservative halls of academia, Nietzsche saw more clearly than others that a new standpoint, an entirely new Weltanschauung (or “world view” / attitude) irrevocably and eventually predominate among the knowledge leaders. This new Weltanschauung in which intellect was the new “spirit” or, said differently, intellect replaced the old religious conception of spirit. For the centuries since Luther, an underlying psychological attitude guided collective and personal life giving an unconscious foundation to its morals and ethics. Now this era had ended.

Jung comments on this saying:

“[This was] the mistake of the 19th century, or the magic if you like to say so. We thought we were mighty magicians and could fetter the spirit in the form of intellect and make it serviceable to our needs … " (Lecture VI, 9 June 1937).

The Nazi movement

When intellect replaces spirit, it undergoes a "deification” which I use not in the metaphysical or theological sense, but psychologically as meaning a personification of a dynamism in the unconscious. And when such an activation of the unconscious is not subjected to individual human reflection it expresses itself autonomously in institutions acting with compulsivity, a power-psychology, and not having an ethos of tolerance of other standpoints.

Jung eventually understood that when such an attitude replaces the traditional religious conception of spirit that eventually a conscious hubris results. The ego has left its place amidst humanity and inflates to grandiose size. And this too affected Nietzsche so that he didn’t consider or, more accurately put, was psychologically blinded to the destructive aspects of some of the ideas expressed in “Thus Spake Zarathustra”. These ideas possessed an enormous stickiness (2) indicative of the presence of an activated unconscious idea (archetypal) that the later Nazi movement adopted and which it would inculcate itself with and spread to others.

Notes

1. By “possessed” I mean that from the psychological standpoint, the scientific collective of this era were for the most part gripped by an unconscious drive of fascination (in German, Ergriffenheit, meaning “a state of being seized or possessed”). This drive, which served well to aid the new discoveries which would take place, created the psychic tension necessary to dethrone the old scientific models, for instance the theories of ether in physics or phlogiston in chemistry. When the underlying psychological basis for a model in any field of science or psychology no longer lays silent in the unconscious, individuals can then see new things about the world, and in the case of the scientific mind, the end of the nineteenth century generated a dramatic influx on new ideas about the material world. Consciously, the intellect leaders of the era would have said that the old models now longer fit the facts of life as they are now observed.

2. Malcolm Gladwell in his book “The Tipping Point” writes this:

Stickiness means that a message makes an impact. You can’t get it out of your head. It sticks in your memory" (p. 25).

A Psychological Look at Spirit (Part 1)

“Ye know only the sparks of the spirit: but ye do not see the anvil which it is, and the cruelty of its hammer” (Lecture VI, 9 June 1937).

The passage can be thought of as an image that shows the effect of man upon nature: Nietzsche’s “sparks” represented as an analogy to the dynamic power of friction which can start a fire.

Jung in his commentary generates a complex imaginal scene to speak about the psychological aspects of "spirit.“ Taking the image like one might interpret a dream:

The unseen players of the scene:

1. The mother anvil (inferred as the receiver of the blows of the hammer) which Jung later calls "yin”.

2. The father of the hammer which Jung later calls “yang”

The first two I have anthropomorphized but one can just as easily, as Jung has done, call them yin and yang respectively, or two truths that are the opposite and both equally valid.

3. The agent, the one who gives power to the hammer. This is the complex image of the dynamism of spirit

The action of the scene:

The work of the hammer upon the anvil transfers materially into the work of shaping the metal.

Psychological understanding:

The dynamism of action is “spirit” and it generates conflict (the fire that the “sparks” of the hammer striking the anvil") or potential conflict. This is the forever-present conflict between feminine and masculine, passive and active, receiving and acting, etc. (yin and yang) that is present and only part of an understanding of the psychological aspects of the scene.

The other part – or one part of many parts of this understanding – is also the “truth” of the “spirit”. That is, in simplified form, the “truth” of the the feminine principle (eros) and the masculine principle (logos). These two can be seen as the underlying archetypal basis of the, at times, conflictual relationship between man and woman in real life.

“The possibilities of development discussed in the preceding chapters were, at bottom, alienations of the self, ways of divesting the self of its reality in favour of an external role or in favour of an imagined meaning. In the former case the self retires into the background and gives place to social recognition; in the latter, to the auto-suggestive meaning of a primordial image. In both cases the collective has the upper hand. Self-alienation in favour of the collective corresponds to a social ideal; it even passes for social duty and virtue, although it can also be misused for egotistical purposes”

(para. 267, Jung, C.G. (1966). “The Relations Between the Ego and the Unconscious.” In R.F.C. Hull (Trans.), The Collected Works of C.G. Jung (Vol. 7, pp. 123-241). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (Original work published in 1934.)

By “alienations of the self” Jung refers to the normal separation from the original unconscious wholeness present at birth. As the infant develops into a child the first of many “endpoints” is reached when a single conscious function (either sensation, intuition, thinking, or feeling) becomes the dominant way in which adaptation to life slowly replaces the participation with the mother’s psyche. In the teen years, a continuity of consciousness develops which one can recognize empirically - which we call the “ego” complex.

The development of consciousness, of which the ego is the center, facilitates social adaptation to other children, school, and home life, yet the cost is a loss of connection with the “self” - the psychic totality of conscious and the conscious. The effects of this “loss of connection to the self” normally resurfaces in the transition to midlife. For more on this see Jung’s article “The Stages of Life,” Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Vol. 8, pp. 387-403.